Eye of the Tiger

And I want to eat nothing but fried food, sushi, pasta, pizza, hamburgers, mac and cheese. This is torture! Don’t know how I will survive the next 19 days …

Day 1 of my 21-day Cleanse and I’m already hungry.
It’s going to take all of my will-power to last! Yikes

In the city of San Francisco, the public bus transportation system is called the Muni. Some Muni lines are better than others in terms of the amount of crazy that it serves. And depending on which line you take and what neighborhoods the line takes you through, the more you learn to anticipate meeting some crazy people along the way.

My house is smack-dab in the middle of 2 bus lines. And both of them go through the outskirts of the rough parts of town and on the normal morning bus ride from my house to Market Street where my office is, there aren’t too many crazies. But, as always, there is the exception to the rule (which has only been exercised on one other occasion in the past 2 and 1/2 years I’ve lived in the city of SF).

This morning, I got onto a semi-crowded bus. And by semi-crowded, I mean most of the seats were taken but there was still a lot more standing room left in addition to a couple of seats. I personally like the back of the bus. It’s a lot less crowded and a little bit cooler and just generally less chaotic. So, I sat in the back row, right corner seat. 2 stops later, a cute hipster inter-racial (white boy, asian girl of course) sat down right next to me. That left 2 seats open.

2 stops after that, a particularly normal looking young black male gets on. And by normal, I mean his sweats seem to have been washed fairly recently and he’s pretty clean-shaven. Said young black male (YBM) is wearing a panda hat on his head, which I guess should have been my first indication of something not quite right going on here. His panda hat was not the one that you see that’s knitted. But it’s an actual stuffed panda face on a hat. In hindsight, this should have been my first inclination that this man was crazy. CRAZY.

YBM sits down 3 seats away from me, 1 seat away from the male in the inter-racial couple, and starts shouting “RAH, RAH, RAHHHH”. Now, I’m not talkin Lady Gaga a la Bad Romance Rah Rah. I’m talking straight up shouting at you like he’s a tiger. Then he starts screaming “Fag-boy! Fag-boy! Stop looking at me! Bitch … bitch ass ho … Bitch” over and over again. By the time we get to Van Ness, he’s pulled down the window and starts screaming at a lady who is not walking in a particularly confident way. In fact, she looks like she rolled out of bed, pulled on the biggest, heaviest coat she has in her closet and is walking down to the nearest Coffee Shop to get some caffeine in her. YBM starts screaming at her, something to the effect of “Bitch, don’t you be walking around like you got some Gucci on! Bitch! Fuck you Bitch!” He then sat down, started to mutter some rap lyrics by Snoop Dogg/DMX all the while turning into outbursts of hatred toward this poor random woman, “Bitch I’ll cut you. Like a cake”.

All the while, I’m thinking to myself, “this is how people die, they go to work thinking it’s going to be a normal, they get on the bus, and some dirty-rap-filled, explosive crazy person is going to start brandishing a knife or a rusty fork and start slashing people”. The other half of me is admonishing myself internally for being a racist. Would I be thinking the same thing if this person was white? Probably not.

I get really sad when I think about stuff like this or see some crazy crackhead on the street who has no hair on one side of his head because he just keeps walking around rubbing the same spot over and over and mutters incoherent sentances to himself. I’ve seen my fair share of crazies, especially here in SF, where the transient community is quite large. But a lot of them are black. I wouldn’t say a majority but I’d say at least a 1/3 of the transient population. How did they get to this point in their lives? What happened to them? Were they always crazy?

And just what are you supposed to do in this sort of situation? What is the proper etiquette to handle crazy people? I just ignored it and hoped and prayed he’d get off the bus soon and thanked God that there was at least 2 people in between me and the crazy murderous rapper YBM. And then after he got off and my stop was coming up, I said, “thanks for being here this morning. hope you don’t meet any more crazies today, guys” to the interracial couple sitting next to me.